


my heart as a place for it to happen

by eudaimon



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-31
Updated: 2013-01-31
Packaged: 2017-11-27 14:56:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/663297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Brad's always struggled to find words for it - that moment when respect tipped into something else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	my heart as a place for it to happen

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PJVilar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PJVilar/gifts).



> This is my first Generation Kill fic in a year and a half. Jesus, it feels good to have these boys back. My heart, my heart. This was written based on an original prompt from Jen (about fumbling first times), who I would call the Gunny Wynn to my Nate, but that wouldn't quite be what I meant. Or it wouldn't be enough.
> 
> This fic plays into a glorious old fandom cliche and has a title paraphrased from a poem by Richard Siken.
> 
> This is also my first real attempt at writing fic predominantly set 'in theater'. Oh, well. I hope that this turns out.

_which brings us back_  
to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes,  
not from the absence of violence, but despite  
the abundance of it. 

 

 _ **Before**_ :

Matilda. They’re not talking about anything important; the platoon is sitting around shooting the shit and Nate and Gunny stop to check what’s going. Sitting on the floor, Brad tips his head back to look up at him, Nate Fick with his boyish, handsome face. A quick smile flickers, but green eyes stay watchful. The two of them don’t pause long before they’re moving away again; almost as soon as he’s there, Nate’s already turning to go. Brad knows that it’s a conscious decision; always, there's this distance in Nate - this wide and wild sort of loneliness that's entirely of his own making. Because he's a Lieutenant and because someone has to be above it, has to be free of the stupid, careless shit that the rest of them do because they just don't know any better. 

Brad knows better, but that's different, too.  
His loneliness is different from Nate's. 

Brad leans back against the side of the Humvee and watches Nate walk away. He must, he thinks, have been aware of Nate before they shipped out, back at Pendleton, but it's difficult to recall. Sometimes, he wakes up feeling like the inside of his skull has been scoured clean. Life before the desert is a straight line. He wasn't even born before this. 

So maybe Nate _didn't_ exist before this, either? Maybe he slipped into being like a wish, like something Brad didn't even know he needed…a thing he never even knew he'd want.

But here they are, anyway. And so it goes.  
God bless Kurt Vonnegut.

Brad never really knows where he is anymore. It's not a new feeling. When Jenny decided that she'd prefer somebody else (somebody who was, perhaps, warmer), Brad spent months feeling like he was stumbling, like somebody else was working his body with strings. Nate doesn't make him feel _exactly_ like that but it's something similar. Reminiscent. He finds himself wanting to please Nate like he's never wanted anything, finds himself scrambling for it in ridiculous ways. He misjudges the tone easily; sometimes, Nate knocks him flat. But he's a Marine, so he already knows how to make do.

Hoo-rah.

What he learns: to roll with punches. To pick himself up. And go on.

*  
He’ll never know when it changed, just that he’s intensely aware of it when it has.

He might be imagining it, but he thinks that there's a different quality to the way that Nate looks him at him suddenly, something trembling and distinct. There is steel in Nate's spine that Brad admires whole-heartedly. He’s the best kind of LT because Brad knows that he can trust him, knows that he’ll take any hit that he can for his platoon. They guys have always called Brad “Ice-man”, which is a name that was hard-won, involving years of long cooling and tactical retreat. 

Only it’s not so easy, anymore.

“Sucks when you’re in the dog-house, Brad,” says Ray, meditatively. There’d been a particular look in Nate’s eye, earlier; of course Ray had registered it too. “You could always offer to suck his fucking cock. Take the edge off.”

“Thank you for your assessment of the situation, Corporal Person,” says Brad, his voice heavy with a sigh. “But could you resist your natural tendency towards homoeroticism for five minutes straight?”

But what Ray is really fucking effective at is finding the cracks, the worn places, and worrying them, as though with his teeth or the edge of his thumbnail - working his way in deeper. At some point, Brad started to feel comforted by Ray's presence in the seat beside him. Ray might have a lot of deep-seated, pathological problems, but he's also one of the best damn RTOs in the business; radios, even busted ones, sing for him and he's good at staying awake along through the long watches of the night. Sometimes, Brad wonders what Ray dreams about when he does sleep. He wonders if Nate's also out there, awake in the dark. Brad hardly ever remembers his dreams and, when he does, he’s always in Iraq.

All of his thoughts are circles.

At Brad's nine, Ray croons 'Sweet Child O' Mine' to the open window. Brad hadn’t even realised that he was still awake. Walt stirs in his sleep too. The radio chatters; nothing important. Brad closes his eyes for a minute or two.

*

There is a boy and he is dying in the dust. Brad stands there and feels stupid, heavy. On average, it costs one million dollars to train a Recon Marine. Watching Doc Bryan work on the kid, Brad feels every single cent of that going to waste. This is not how they were supposed to operate. This not how any of this was supposed to be. They’ve fucked up here and they’re going to go on fucking up. The path that they’re carving through this country is hard and final and forever and this boy symbolises everything that they’re doing wrong here because they might have had dive school, jump school, ranger school, all the rest, but nobody prepared them for sitting in tin-plate Humvees, invading a country. Nobody told them how to do this _right_.

Which is a reason but not an excuse.

Still, it feels important, so they stand in a line and face down Ferrando: Brad, Nate, Doc. Brad feels as though he’s holding his breath.

Ferrando capitulates and Alpha take the boy. Brad stands and watches Nate walk away, watches him for as long as he can and then goes to find Trombley. Doc Bryan stands staring at the ground until the rest of them are gone like he doesn’t trust himself to speak.

Battle won, but the war stretches out ahead of them, unknowable.

 

*

Later, he'll think that maybe it was the result of some kind of psychic tremor or a flickering memory of a prophetic dream. Or one of those fucking magic eye pictures that people spend years trying to see. Something reveals itself at the last minute. He glimpses the unglimpseable.

The men in the shadows of the trees.

Everything explodes, the way things do. They are showers of sparks. He's aware of Ray standing, screaming into the night because, shit, none of them want to die on this bridge. This is not the S.O.P. This is not how things are going to turn out. Bullet casings burn where they touch. It’s not going well; Brad can feel the frustration pouring off Ray’s skin like heat waves. Dimly, he’s aware of Nate out there in the dark, running between the Humvees, setting everyone right. It feels as though Brad's heart ought to be hammering in his chest, but why would it be? He trusts Nate more than he trusts anyone else in the world. He knows how effective he can be. 

And they're just too pretty to die.  
It's not their day. Can’t be.

In the giddiness that follows, he doesn't really think about it. There's Rolling Stone to take care of and Ray's all but vibrating with nervous energy that has nowhere to go but up and out. Brad tips his head back and looks up in the star-eyed night. He feels something slam into place in his chest, like a door pulled closed.

Later, he'll be able to pin-point it, down to the second - that moment when he went from wanting to just fuck Nate Fick to being in love with him. Head over heels, irrevocably gay in love.

One, two, three.

A car door slams in the dark. And everyone’s quiet. And everything is somehow changed by the experience. By death, or at least the absence of it.

*

They progress. He dreams of lying dormant like a stone.

*

He doesn't think of it as empirical, as a thing that's particularly easy or particularly hard. It's a part of him, like a limb or the mysterious clockwork meanderings of organs. Maybe things would be different if he was a civilian, though? Maybe then he'd have time for longing, time to daydream about it, get lost in it, jerk off to a hundred hazy images of Nate Fick's fucking perfect face. 

But he's not a civilian, is he? He's a marine, a stone cold, brutal, death-dealing motherfucker, bone-deep, stone-cold, and the luxury of being in love is for some other fool.

Still, things shift. Which shouldn't come as a surprise - this entire fucking operation is built on sand. There are no rules of engagement. No map. Nate comes to stand beside him, leaning against the hood of the Humvee in the dark. They don't really talk; they don't really have to because, inside, they're built to the same basic specification - both possessed of endless, faithful hearts.

A thing: it's fucking cold in the desert at night. Brad was in Afghanistan, which was also cold at night, but he never felt this useless for this long, shrunk down, neutered, prevented from the purpose for which Recon was specifically designed. It's...disappointing. But there's some small measure of comfort to be drawn from the close proximity of Nate, the smallest amount of warmth bleeding from Nate's arm into his in the dark.

And like does speak to like.

*

It's a simple enough question; Rolling Stone means it honestly enough. He leans against the side of the Humvee and looks at Brad, his notebook up and ready for the answer.

“Colbert,” he says. “What would you be if you weren’t a Marine?”

Only, it’s not a question that Brad’s got an answer to. He’s never considered what he’d be if he wasn’t here; he tries to think about it and his brain goes blank. But he likes Reporter, has come to like him, and doesn’t want to leave him with no answer at all. Racking his brains, he remembers being four or five years old, around the time his sister was born, and a period of time spent wanting to be a fighter plane – not a _pilot_ but the plane itself.

Which is as good an answer as any.

Stripped to the waist, he soars. The tips of his wings graze the dry, trembling grass. He’s aware of the others, these brothers in arms: Ray staring with his mouth hanging open, dumb; Walt smiling for the first time in days; Nate with the hook chattering against his shoulder. Brad spirals in to land, dropping to his knees in front of Ray and Rolling Stone. He throws his head and shouts, feels the five year old step out and the Sergeant filter back in.

“Better now,” he says.

Somebody smiles, and says _okay, Brad - here's to your dream_.

*

Everything smells of cigarettes, which reminds Brad of how long it's been since he _smoked_ a cigarette which reminds him of all of the other things that he hasn't done in a long time, like surfing, swimming, riding his bike, fucking a girl that he loves. Loved. Whatever. Everything's different now. Something did or did not happen. Baghdad did or did not fall.

It's difficult to tell.

The city itself is a blur. There’s the struggle in Nate that’s painful to watch – the man he is warring with the man they want. What he’s willing to do. Where he’s willing to dig his heels in. Brad’s never trusted anyone so much in his life.

 _I trust your judgement,_ he says. Because he can’t find the rest of the words he needs.  
And the Corps won’t forget. The Corps doesn’t forget shit.

But neither does Brad.

*

History flickers in the corner of Brad’s eye. It goes away if he looks directly at it. He tries to feel like they've achieved something, anyway. He tries to picture grass growing to fill the swathe that they’ve cut through this country, to hide their path forever.

The others are clustered around a laptop. The liquor that they shouldn't be drinking tastes like shit. They’ve all come so close to falling apart entirely. Nate looks at him for a long, long time before he turns away. And Ray’s there, of course, with booze in paper cups. And maybe there’s something heavy in Brad’s eyes, based on the way Ray laughs and looks away. The last thing that Brad remembers seeing is Ray dropping his arm around Walt’s shoulders. Maybe Poke calls his name, but he’s already got his eyes on the door.

A moment outside in the dust. Brad walks a step or two behind Nate in the dusty dry of the afternoon. Other guys drift out and Nate keeps walking. Brad’s heart feels like a live, caged thing in his chest, even though he tries as hard as he can to feel cold.

They turn a corner. It’s quiet enough. He reaches out with his free hand and grazes Nate’s sleeve.

He thinks, _but you must know._

“Yeah,” says Nate, “But no, Brad. Not yet.”  
Not yet.

*

 _ **After**_ :

Nothing changes - he’s not sure that he ever thought that it would. The articles in “Rolling Stone” come and go. Brad reads them. Digests. He calls Evan Wright to talk about it, gets emails from Ray and spends a long, warm evening in Poke’s backyard, drinking beer and talking about it until he was too drunk to get on his bike and ended up crashing on the couch. Poke claimed that Wright’s reporting was going to make everything hard.

Brad rolls his eyes and asks, _when was anything easy, Poke_?

He hears nothing from Nate Fick. Still, he manages to hold himself in check. What would be gained? At home, there’s leave and Brad tries to make the most of it. Poke takes his daughter to her dance classes. Ray probably goes home and eats the fuck out of his girlfriend’s pussy. Brad hears that Doc Bryan meets a girl. Brad takes care to keep busy. He goes up to his sister’s place for a few days, spends some time with her kids. Surfs. Reconditions his bike and then goes out riding for hours at a time. The road brings peace. He feels wiped clean.

*

His place has a porch, narrow, a place to get out of the wind. He finds Nate tucked in against the front door, hands in the pockets of his hoodie, ear-buds in place. Eyes closed. Still, Brad harbours no illusions that he’s sneaked up on Nate; those green eyes open the minute that his boot hits the step.

There’s no way that Brad could have been prepared for that sweet and sudden smile.

“So you’re the one who gets to decide when it’s time?” asks Brad, leaning past Nate to slip the key into the lock.  
“That’s not what this is, Brad,” says Nate.  
“Alright.”

He turns the key. 

*

Before she got married, Brad spent a couple of years living with his sister. There are still touches of her in the apartment – the couch isn’t something that Brad would ever have chosen and there’s little bits of coloured glassware that serve no purpose other than the brighten up otherwise white surfaces. Realistically, Brad knows that he could just box everything that he doesn’t like up but, somehow, they’ve filtered into what he thinks of as _home_.

And he might not miss it when he’s gone, but you’ve got to have something to come back to.

He sits on the edge of the couch and watches Nate wandering around his space, touching things lightly like he’s feeling out the edges of something. In the desert, Brad got used to watching every move that Nate made; things are subtly different in civilian clothes. It’s like Nate’s balanced slightly differently; his centre of gravity is in a slightly different place now. Brad watches him and realises that he’s rehearsing a conversation in his head – something to do with _I love you_ and _I’ve wanted you_ and _it’s been the longest time_.

But none of those words seems adequate, now.

In the end, he reaches out and catches Nate’s hand. At first, it’s just a brush of fingers, no grip, but Brad can’t remember If they’ve ever touched like it, bare skin on bare skin. It’s only a little thing but he feels himself entirely shaken.

“Nate…” he says. The words catch in his throat. 

It’s Nate who moves his hand, Nate who threads their fingers together. Brad thinks about Shakespeare. Palm to palm, it makes sense that they wouldn’t necessarily have much to say. They came all the way through Mesopotamia with an economy of words. They never had any trouble making themselves understood.

Tugging on his hand, Brad manages to get Nate into his lap, a leg bent on either side of his thighs. He notices that Nate is wearing fucking Chuck Taylors like some sort of kid. It’s incongruous and lovely. They touch each other lightly; Nate’s fingers graze the bridge of Brad’s nose, his cheekbones and lips and Brad’s fingers sneak under the neckline of Nate’s t-shirt, skimming against his skin. When Nate shifts his weight, Brad realises how hard he is. One of his hands slip down to Nate’s ass and he tugs him in closer.

He might imagine it, but he thinks Nate moans.

After that, they gather pace. They’re getting there. It doesn’t matter that neither of them seem to have the words for it; they don’t need words and maybe they never did. Nate unzips his own hoodie and shrugs it off his shoulders, peels his shirt off and drops it on the floor. Brad doesn’t remember ever seeing Nate shirtless before, not in theater. He must have washed but nobody ever saw it happen. Instead, Nate gave the impression of having been created brand new every morning. It wasn’t until near the end that Brad had begun to see the way the whole thing had worn on him.

How it had worn on all of them.

Fumbling with Nate’s belt, the button on his jeans, it’s as though he’s never undressed anybody before. It’s been a long time, but not that long; he still remembers the way. His thumbs follow the sharp jut of Nate’s hipbones. Somehow, he finds a way to shift closer. It’s a cliché that Marines know how to make do, but some things become stereotypes because they’re also _true_. Clothes get shoved to one side and they shift until they’re touching, until he’s stroking Nate’s dick and Nate’s stroking his and he can feel Nate’s breath against his cheek.

“Fuck,” mumbles Nate, shifting to press his dick through the grasping circle of Brad’s fingers. “ _Fuck_. I love you.”

And there it is. There’s what Brad’s been fumbling for since halfway through the war. There are the words he’s been unable to find. It started with Nate’s judgement being the only thing that Brad had complete faith in and this is what came instead. It sounds so simple, once Nate’s said it. It’s still the most complicated thing in the world. Brad’s fingers tighten, his grip shifting and Nate makes a small, broken sound, his breath sobbing against Brad’s skin. It’s then that Brad realises that they haven’t kissed yet, that that would be the final step and something that he can’t take back.

Not that he’d want to take it back.

His free hand palms the short shaved hair at the nape of Nate’s neck, pulling him down. For a moment, there’s still space between them, a breath or two, and then Nate’s lips graze his, slow at first, light and gentle but growing in heat, growing in hunger, until all Brad can think about is fucking, peeling Nate out of the rest of his clothes and fucking him into the mattress. Or Nate fucking him. It doesn’t matter. He has this need to forget where his borders are. To melt together.

“I am never leaving you,” says Nate and he might me that he’s never leaving this couch, this moment of physical closeness but Brad sees it as a longer game than that. He rubs his thumb across the head of Nate’s dick, his free hand still on the back of Nate’s neck.

“You need to stay right here,” he says, and then he loses any other words that he was going to say as he comes. It takes Nate a few more strokes before he’s trembling and Brad has never, ever seen him as undone as he is right here. Right now.

Neither of them move far. Brad mops up with the hem of his t-shirt and then discards it entirely, pulling Nate in against his bare chest. They don’t fit quite comfortably, not yet, but there’s plenty of time for that.

“Nate,” he says, but he can’t find the words.  
Still, he thinks. Still, you must know.


End file.
